Google Maps Outage. Did You Lose Your Way?

My friend Esme Vos, who runs Mapplr, emailed to let me know that she was having problems with Google Maps, which she has been using as an engine to power her mapped social guides. Others have complained about similar problems on the Google Maps Discussion Board. The situation was supposedly resolved later in the day, but the question is why did Google, which had time to talk about the fact that it had doubled the coverage of its street view, not mention the outage — which outraged so many of its users — on its blog(s). It is amusing to see how Google, a company that owns Blogger and runs and operates dozens of PR blogs, doesn’t like to talk about issues and problems unless it can spin them.